Installed at the Florida State University Museum of Fine Art, Tallahassee, FL

2015

When I was in middle school I was too embarrassed to ask my mother to buy me a girdle so a friend taught me how to bind my stomach with ACE bandages. This became a ritual for us. Come to school, meet in the bathroom; help wrap whichever offending body part in this makeshift elastic prison. Binding with elastic bandages is unsafe. It is constricting, uncomfortable, and makes it very hard to breathe. It was dangerous but did exactly what we needed. To us we looked thinner, and that is the only thing that mattered. In this performance, “Suck it in, Wrap it up” I use a rope made of elastic Ace Bandages, duct tape, plastic wrap, queen sized control top pantyhose, gauze, athletic tape, and other iconic domestic materials often used to bind body parts. I continuously wrap and constrict my abdomen and breasts as to flatten and hide these once embarrassing parts of my then developing body. For the video I use the multichannel technique to show two versions of this ritual. In the first channel I am wrapping my body while in the second the video is reversed to show the unwrapping of the body. The videos begin and end the same way. One version of me all wrapped up, and another version preparing to do the wrapping.